Whose Life Would You Rather Have? — and Update

In honor of the upcoming Harlow centennial: Whose life would you rather have? Would you rather be like Jean Harlow, who died when she was 26, but whose memory will be cherished for as long as there are movies, whose image and personality are indelible, who is an adorable and adored presence in cinema forever and ever?

Or Mary Dees, Harlow’s stand-in, who is remembered almost entirely as Harlow’s stand-in — for being photographed, with her back to the camera, after Harlow’s death, to fill in the final scenes of SARATOGA . . . but who died a month short of her 93rd birthday in 2004.

I’m not talking about the specifics of their lives, just the stature and the numbers. Revered forever but dead at 26? Or having a very unimportant (yet vaguely remembered) place in history but dead at almost 93?

Mary Dees (1911-2004)

UPDATE: The contrast between Dees and Harlow is pretty stark. For me, I think the only answer could be Dees, for a number of reasons: 1) 26 is really young, so young that you don’t really know what’s going on. Something kicks in at thirty that’s like a second wave of perception — astrologers think it has something to do with the solar system returning to the same configuration as at your birth every 29-plus years. In any case, to not have that experience is to miss the full circuit.

But there’s also something else. To be an actor or actress is to be an interpretive artist. So it’s not really to live in a state of ecstatic creation. It involves a lot of waiting. It’s a glamorous life, but a lot of what glamor is is illusory. The red carpet is a lot more amazing from the sidelines. When you’re on it, it’s very nice, but you see the footprints. It’s just people.

To be Mozart, on the other hand, is to go through life hearing music no one has ever heard before. It would be to exist in a flood tide of ecstasy, at least in your work. That would be a lot different than being Jean Harlow. So perhaps a better way to frame this question would be to ask, “Would you rather be Mozart, who died at 35 and wrote a series of immortal masterpieces — or Luigi Cherubini, who died at 81 and made one opera that is still occasionally performed today (“Medea”)?

Basically the Harlow question asks, “How important is it for you to be remembered?” The Mozart question asks something more complicated: “How important is it for you to be remembered, and would it be worth it to you to trade 46 years to have the privilege of that level of genius throughout your life?”